Book News: The narrowed politics of form in contemporary literature

 Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature

BY MITCHUM HUEHLS

Ohio State UP, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1524-1

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215241.html

Can form be political? Do specific aesthetic and literary forms necessarily point us toward a progressive or reactionary politics? Artists, authors, and critics like to imagine so, but what happens when they lose control of the politics of their forms? In Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature, Mitchum Huehls argues that art’s interest in revolution did not end with the twentieth century, as some critics would have it, but rather that the relationship between literary forms and politics has been severed, resulting in a twenty-first century investment in forms of generality such as genre, gesture, constructivism, and abstraction. 

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Focusing on three particular domains (art, theory, and revolution) in which the relationship between form and politics has collapsed, Huehls shows how twenty-first-century US fiction writers such as Chris Kraus, Percival Everett, Jonathan Safran Foer, Rachel Kushner, Salvador Plascencia, and Sheila Heti are turning to forms of generality that lead us toward a more modest, ad hoc, context-dependent way to think about the politics of form. The result is the first major study of generality in literature.

“With theoretical capaciousness, thematic timeliness, and rhetorical clarity, Art, Theory, Revolution makes a much-needed intervention into ongoing discussions about fictional realism, historical fiction, and political forms. In this way, Huehls promises to enliven debates about how novels possess their own political agency and contribute aesthetically to the making of theory.” —Alexandra Kingston-Reese, author of Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life

“Huehls captures what’s exciting and unique about recent American fiction and remains clear-sighted despite dealing with difficult concepts in aesthetic theory, deconstructive thinking, and the politics of revolution. Art, Theory, Revolution breaks new ground in how we understand cultural production after postmodernism.” —Daniel Grausam, author of On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War

Mitchum Huehls is associate professor in the Department of English at UCLA. He is the author of After Critique: Twenty-First Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age and Qualified Hope: A Postmodern Politics of Time and co-editor (with Rachel Greenwald Smith) of Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture.

JML 46.1 (Fall 2022) "Literary Ethics, Literary History" is LIVE!

JML 46.1 (Fall 2022) on the theme "Literary Ethics, Literary History" is now available on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/48859

Content includes:

David Dwan 

Unlucky Jim: Conrad, Chance, Ethics

FREE!

Shea Hennum 

Reading Borges Ethically

Aubrey Lively 

Ye Shall Bear Witness: An Ethics of Survival in W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn 

Maggie Laurel Boyd 

Ordinary Language for Extraordinary Loss

Jack Dudley 

The Secularizing Work of the Novel: Modernist Form and Ian McEwan’s Saturday 

Heather Clark 

The Voice Within: Sylvia Plath’s Juvenilia, 1947-1950 

Johan Adam Warodell 

Reading Conrad’s Unpublished Trilogy: “Youth,” Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim

Howard Fisher 

The Emergence of Resemblances between People: Stein’s Diagrams in The Making of Americans 

Susan Farrell 

American Fascism and the Historical Underpinnings of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night 

FREE!

Walter Kalaidjian 

Occult Surrealism as “Profane Illumination”: Mina Loy, Leonora Carrington, and Ithell Colquhoun

Reviews

Christopher GoGwilt 

“Going Dead Slow”: Joseph Conrad’s Writing the Now, a review of Yael Levin, Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism 

John Zilcosky 

Kafka, or What Does Literature Sound Like? 

Ashley Byczkowski 

Derridean Deconstruction and Modernist Writer-Sons

Ali AlYousefi 

Revitalizing Close Reading

Book News: A deep dive into Virginia Woolf's education

Virginia Woolf's Apprenticeship: Becoming an Essayist

BY BETH RIGEL DAUGHERTY

Edinburgh UP, 2022

ISBN: 9781399504515

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-virginia-woolf-s-apprenticeship.html

This study takes up Woolf’s challenge to probe the relationship between education and work, specifically her education and her work as an essayist. It expands her education beyond her father’s library to include not only a broader examination of her homeschooling but also her teaching at Morley College and her early book reviewing. It places Virginia Stephen’s learning in the historical and cultural contexts of education for women, the working classes and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Weaving together Virginia Stephen’s homeschooling, her teaching and her writing for the newspapers, Beth Rigel Daugherty demonstrates how these three strands shape Virginia Woolf’s essay persona, her essays, and her relationship with her readers. She also shows why Virginia Stephen’s apprenticeship compels Virginia Woolf to become a pedagogical essayist. The volume publishes two holograph draft lectures by Virginia Stephen for the first time and mines rarely used archival materials. It also includes five appendices, one detailing Virginia Stephen’s library and another her apprenticeship essays.

This is the first in a two-volume study of Virginia Woolf’s essays that analyzes Virginia Stephen’s development and Virginia Woolf’s achievements as an essay writer.

Drawing on deep research into the social history of women’s lives and of education, Daugherty shows with superb attention to detail how Virginia Stephen’s early experiences of teaching and of being taught nourished the seeds that flowered as Virginia Woolf, "an essayist compelled to teach." This is impeccable and important scholarship. -– Mark Hussey, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Pace University

This electrifying magnum opus illuminates Virginia Woolf’s formative experience of teaching working-class adult students while starting her own career as a freelance book reviewer. Beth Rigel Daugherty shows how helping and identifying with novice learners influenced Woolf’s nonfiction aesthetic. Over many subsequent years, Woolf made a striking attempt to write essays in ways that would welcome ordinary readers.

Virginia Woolf’s Apprenticeship launches a new era in the way Woolf is assessed and will stimulate scholars, teachers, and writers in the broad and burgeoning genre of creative nonfiction. Deeply researched historically and biographically, it contributes beyond Woolf studies to the fields of memoir, personal essay, journalism, and pedagogy. Warm of manner and lively of style, it has a bold and ambitious purpose: to help us see Virginia Woolf anew as a working, learning, growing person and writer. Woolf emerges as someone deeply concerned with connecting with others regardless of their class and gender, thereby attempting to transcend the limits of her family, her heritage, and her time. Showing this is the book’s larger, remarkable achievement. – Richard Gilbert, MFA, nonfiction author, teacher, and publisher

Recently retired from Otterbein University in Ohio, Beth Rigel Daugherty taught modernist English literature, Virginia Woolf and Appalachian and Native American literature along with many thematically focused writing courses for 36 years. Falling in love with Virginia Woolf and her essays while at Rice University, she has been presenting and publishing on both ever since with peer-reviewed articles in edited collections; editions of the “How Should Read a Book?” holograph draft and Woolf’s fan letters in Woolf Studies Annual; and, with Mary Beth Pringle, the Modern Language Association teaching volume on To the Lighthouse.

Book News: Affinities of affect in Lear, Eliot, and Smith

Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, T. S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith

BY JASMINE JAGGER

Oxford UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780198868804

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/rhythms-of-feeling-in-edward-lear-t-s-eliot-and-stevie-smith-9780198868804

Rich with unpublished material and detailed insight, Rhythms of Feeling offers a new reading of three of the most celebrated poets: Edward Lear, T.S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith. Tracing exciting lines of interplay, affinity, and influence between these writers for the first time, the book shifts the terms of critical debate on Lear, Eliot, and Smith and subtly reorients the traditional account of the genealogies of literary modernism. 

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Going beyond a biographically-framed close reading or a more general analysis framed by affect theory, the volume traces these poets' "affective rhythms" (fits, tears, nerves) to consider the way that poetics, the mental and physical process of writing and reading, and the ebbs and flows of their emotional weather might be in dialogue. Attentive, acute, and often forensic, the book broadens its reach to contemporary writers and medical accounts of creativity and cognition. Alongside deep critical study, this volume seeks to bring emotional intelligence to criticism, finding ways of speaking lucidly and humanely about emotional and physical states that defy lucidity and stretch our sense of the human.

• Studies affect and emotion in the poetry of Edward Lear, T.S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith
• Presents an innovative new reading of poetic form
• Uses previously neglected archival materials to cast new light on each writer
• Combines analysis of textual and visual form to draw exciting new parallels between lines written and drawn by the poetic imagination

Jasmine Jagger is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Roehampton. She has published articles in Victorian Poetry, Romanticism, Literary Imagination, The Cambridge Quarterly, Apollo, and The Carrollian.

Book News: Transatlantic view of Eudora Welty

The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty

By DANIELE PITVAY-SOUQUES 

EDITED BY PEARL AMELIA MCHANEY

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN 978-1-4968-4058-5

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/T/The-Eye-That-Is-Language

Danièle Pitavy-Souques (1937–2019) was a European powerhouse of Welty studies. In this collection of essays, Pitavy-Souques pours new light on Welty’s view of the world and her international literary import, challenging previous readings of Welty’s fiction, memoir, and photographs in illuminating ways. The nine essays collected here offer scholars, critics, and avid readers a new understanding and enjoyment of Welty’s work. The volume explores beloved stories in Welty’s masterpiece The Golden Apples, as well as “A Curtain of Green,” “Flowers for Marjorie,” “Old Mr. Marblehall,” “A Still Moment,” “Livvie,” “Circe,” “Kin,” and The Optimist’s Daughter, One Writer’s Beginnings, and One Time, One Place. Essays include “Technique as Myth: The Structure of The Golden Apples” (1979), “A Blazing Butterfly: The Modernity of Eudora Welty” (1987), and others written between 2000 and 2018. Together, they reveal and explain Welty’s brilliance for employing the particular to discover the universal.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Pitavy-Souques, who briefly lived in and often revisited the South, met with Welty several times in her Jackson, Mississippi, home. Her readings draw on the visual arts, European theorists, and styles of modernism, postmodernism, surrealism, as well as the baroque and the gothic. The included essays reflect Pitavy-Souques’s European education, her sophisticated understanding of intellectual theories and artistic movements abroad, and her passion for the literary achievement of women of genius. The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty reveals the way in which Welty’s narrative techniques broaden her work beyond southern myths and mysteries into a global perspective of humanity.

"These readings of Welty’s works provide a coherent and significant picture of Welty as a modernist writer who was not just of her time but ahead of her time. By placing Welty’s work in the context of twentieth-century philosophers, scientists, and artists, Danièle Pitavy-Souques will give readers a renewed appreciation for Welty’s work and firmly position Welty as a major force in the literary canon." --Sarah Gilbreath Ford, author of Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic

Danièle Pitavy-Souques (1937–2019) was professor emerita at the University of Burgundy, France; a recipient of the Eudora Welty Society Phoenix Award and the French Legion of Honor for her work on international women's rights; and a European powerhouse of Welty studies. She published two books and more than a dozen essays on Welty, and she made major contributions to southern and Canadian studies.

Pearl Amelia McHaney is Kenneth M. England Professor of Southern Literature Emerita at Georgia State University and a recipient of the Eudora Welty Society Phoenix Award for outstanding achievement in Welty studies. She is author of A Tyrannous Eye: Eudora Welty’s Nonfiction and Photography and editor of Eudora Welty as Photographer, Occasions: Selected Writings by Eudora Welty, Eudora Welty: The Contemporary Reviews, and A Writer’s Eye: Collected Reviews, all published by University Press of Mississippi.

Book News: Risk as the crux of theatre

When Life Gives You Risk, Make Risk Theatre: Three Tragedies and Six Essays

BY EDWIN WONG

Friesen Press, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-03-913509-3 

https://books.friesenpress.com/store/title/119734000213016212/Edwin-Wong%2C-Gabriel-Jason-Dean-and-Nicholas-Dunn-%26-Emily-McClain-When-Life-Gives-You-Risk%2C-Make-Risk-Theatre

Wong’s first book upended tragic literary theory by arguing that risk is the dramatic fulcrum of the action. It also launched an international playwriting competition (risktheatre.com). His second book expands on how chance directs the action, both on and off the stage.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Inside you will find three risk theatre tragedies by acclaimed playwrights: In Bloom (Gabriel Jason Dean), The Value (Nicholas Dunn), and Children of Combs and Watch Chains (Emily McClain). From the poppy fields of Afghanistan to the motel rooms and doctors’ offices lining interstate expressways, these plays, by simulating risk, show how theatre is a dress rehearsal for life.

Six risk theatre essays round off this volume. In a dazzling display from Aeschylus to Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, and Arthur Miller, Wong reinterprets theatre through chance and probability theory. After risk theatre, you will never look at literature in the same way.

Edwin Wong is a classicist and theatre researcher specializing in the impact of the highly improbable. He has been invited to talk at venues from the Kennedy Center and the University of Coimbra in Portugal to international conferences held by the National New Play Network, the Canadian Association of Theatre Research, the Society of Classical Studies, and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. His first book, The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy, is igniting an international arts movement. He was educated at Brown University and lives in Victoria, Canada.